Task At Hand

Overview: In Q4 2019, the marketing department in partnership with the shopping experience team launched a new feature on-site that would highlight when Zulily had a lower price than Amazon or Walmart. The plan was to do an integrated go to market campaign showcasing Zulily’s value propositions with this new feature being one of them. After deep diving customer insights, it was aligned on that the 3 key value propositions would be around unique finds, best prices, and shipping savvy (the more you buy the more you save as it spreads the shipping fee across more items).

Challenges: The toughest headwind was having contradictory value propositions. The first value prop was around unique finds that customer’s cannot find anywhere else, however the second value proposition was around having the best prices vs. Amazon or Walmart (so not unique). Lastly, shipping at Zulily was complicated and expensive to customers who were used to seeing free shipping on Amazon. The value prop around shipping savvy was to help explain to customers how the shipping works at Zulily and how you can maximize your order to spread out the cost. Another challenge I faced was partnering with all the marketing channels on which message and when would perform best for their respective channel.

Solution: I developed a customer journey map that laid out when and where a customer may be served a message about one of our value propositions. In partnerships with the marketing channels and creative, I developed additional assets to allow for A/B testing to help narrow in on when and where each message was most effective. For some messages instead of just posting a banner with said value prop, we would show that value proposition in action i.e. an email with only unique finds or an email that highlighted where we had the best price.

Cross-Functional Team: Merchandising, Legal, Customer Service, Analytics, Creative, and Marketing (Marketing & Creative led by me).

Marketing Channels: Ads (acquisition and retention), Push Notification, Email, On-Site, TV, Media, Affiliates, Social

Campaign Highlights:

Landing Page: This was used as a touch point for our on-site marketing to provide additional information on the value propositions. Traffic from outside channels were dropped on shoppable pages to optimize for conversion.

Media: Lou Maxon the Creative Director at Zulily partnered with Not to Scale to bring a miniature online Zulily store to life. This commercial was at the time the best performing YouTube ad to date for Zulily.

Acquisition Ads: The Best Price Promise value prop ads performed the best for the acquisition ads, they had a low CPTA than the prior baseline target.

Push Notification Channel: We developed a push notification campaign, where a product was featured having the lowest price on the market. These test campaigns landed in the top 3 most successful campaigns for the channel and became an evergreen program.

Email Channel & On-site Banners: Shipping Savvy value prop performed well in email and on-site when we would add a banner post purchase to remind customers that they could get free shipping until the end of the day and to ‘fill up their basket to maximize savings’.

New Campaign Process: Post launch and entering Q1 of 2020, I developed a framework for campaign management program based off learning from Joy of Shopping that strategically united merchandising, brand, marketing, creative, and technology teams. The team successfully launched 16 integrated go-to-market campaigns through framework in the first 6 months.